I have a major job coming up very soon that requires me to animate ships on realistic water environments. I've been messing around with fluid effect ponds and ocean for ages, and I get oceans looking nice and the way I want them too. However, when it comes to actually putting things in the water I get very stuck indeed. Yes there are a billion and one tuts around about "how to make object float and have wakes etc etc etc" but I'm not floating a freakin cube here. I need the ships to actually look like they would in real life, with decent wakes. I really don't know where to start here. Spray would also be nice. Has anyone whatched the anim for the new British CVF aircraft carriers? It's gotta look like that :O! Apart from jets that stop in mid air in the periphery of shots and choppers with ugly motion blur, their ocean and wakes effects were really sweet. Can anyone help?

Edit: Here's the link to that aircraft carrier. It'll give you a good idea of what I need to do, and it's well worth the wath anyway.

Further edit: What really annoys me though is the way that A/W and Autodesk tote maya fluid's as if their gods, and sure they are good. but you look at the cover of Maya Unlimited 6: Features and there's that jaw dropping U Bot in an ocean andit all lookslovely and gorgeous. Doesthe book even come close to helping you achive that? No. Lame. It's the same with all the tuts I've found on the net. I've found tens of questions like mine on other forums, and they get an answer about how to use the pitiful procedural boat wakes and then they say "No I already tried that and it looks like chimp poo, I need to simulate a proper wake and nice spray blah blah blah" andthen there are no further posts. Is the government trying to covering up how to do it or something? Or is it just that actually its not possible to get those kind of effects with maya in its standard form and you need some Weta-made billion dollar plugin? Grrr it makes me grumpy, that U-boat, plain old fashion false advertising I say.

Rant over, and judging from the posts I've seen everywhere else I don't expect I'll get the answer that I need. Though you guys are top notch wit everything else .

Difficult to tell from that link... but it looks like live footage to me (the sea I mean). As for that U-boat thing, I don't remember it too well but as it was a still image it is less likely to look like chimp poo - it's when you see it all in motion, I guess that's the tricky part. There are some pretty decent books out there on this. I remember a 'Professional tips and tricks' book, which went really in depth. (I'll post a link if I can find it)

Well man, I can almost assure you that you are only going to be disappointed with the results you get from fluids alone.. As you may already know, particles are the way to go about this task, and in that case, tutorials are a thing of the past. You pretty much need to get in under the hood and write up some good old fashioned expressions. I mean, you can get close with the wake stuff that's built into the fluids modules, but you're going to be better off shooting some footage of a boat, and using that however you can, supplementing it with some cg. I hate to say it but yeah, unless you know something about scripting or expressions, you're pretty much screwed on this unless you can come up with a good way to fake the looks of it.

One place i'd start is making yourself some elements in After Effects using Particular if you've got a copy, and make some wake elements from that plugin, I've seen some amazing things done with it. And then export your maya camera out to AE or whatever package you're comping with, and lay those elements in, blending them with some real footage. Otherwise I suppose just start hitting up some serious particle stuff and good luck man! With enough noodling, you'll figure out a way to do it. Good luck to you man.

-Z

Will J

215 posts

01 Sep 2008

I suspected so Zach . Thanks for your support guys. I think you are right Global, they used real footage for the ocean in the CVF anim. I don't have time to put in that kind of R+D, so I guess I'll have to make do with what I have now. Most of the reconstuction videos I've seen even from big firms don't look super real, and my client isn't too fussed about perfect water and wakes. As long as the information presented is neat and clear thats what matters most. Besides, I would have to charge more for all that rendering time involved with super awesome effects like that ! Thanks alot for your help, maybe one day I will revisit it, but for now I'll just have to do the best I can.